Constructing Human Smart Cities

Álvaro de Oliveira holds a M.Sc. in electronic engineering and a Ph.D in Telecommunications from the University College London. He is a visiting Professor at Aalto University, Helsinki at Department of Architecture. He has published more than 160 papers.

He spent 10 years as an academic at the Universities of London, Lisbon and Maputo, 10 years in the industry namely managing a large American IT engineering and manufacturing operation. Consultant to the Board of IT International companies (IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, Vodafone, Timex, Marconi, etc). For 8 years he was an adviser to the Portuguese Minister of Industry and Energy, having been involved in National and Regional innovation Policies. He has been a founding member of the European Network of Living Labs, and has served as President for two mandates being currently President Emeritus being responsible for the International Chair of ENoLL. He created and leads the Human Smart Cities movement and is a board Member of the Connected Smart Cities Network.

He is currently a senior consultant to the World Bank for the domain of Innovation, Living Labs and Human Smart Cities. He coordinates several partnerships and projects to develop and implement Human Smart Cities in 27 European cities located in 17 countries. He has coordinated a large number of International projects in Europe, Latin America, Africa and China. He is very actively involved in extending the Human Smart Cities initiative to Brazil and Latin America. He has created more than 20 technology based companies. He is the CEO of Alfamicro, a company operating in the Innovation domain at research, engineering and implementation levels.

AbstractAlthough current technology-driven implementations of Smart Cities is an important step in the right direction, it fall short in exploiting the most important dimension of cities – the Human dimension.In a Human Smart City, people rather than technology are the true actors of the urban “smartness”. The creation of a participatory innovation ecosystem in which, citizens and communities interact with public authorities and knowledge developers, in a collaborative mode, exploiting the power of co-designed user centered innovation services, is the driving force. This also calls for new governance models that lead to the urban transformation where citizens are the main “drivers of change” and through their empowerment and motivation the major city challenges can be addressed including sustainable behaviour transformation, creating a Better and Happier Society.

Brief BioPaolo Traverso is the Director of FBK ICT irst, Centre for Information Technology at FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) since 2007. The Centre counts about 200 people working on software and services, cloud computing, embedded systems, content and semantics, perception and interaction. He was also CEO of Trento RISE (the Trento Research, Innovation, and Education System) from 2011 until June 2014, the association between FBK and the University of Trento, which is part of the European Institution of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in ICT, the EIT ICT Labs. Paolo joined IRST after working in the advanced technology groups of companies for management information consulting in Chicago, London, and Milan, where he led projects for the development of safety critical systems, data and knowledge management, and service oriented applications. He contributed to research in automated planning and service oriented computing. He was Program Chair of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), General and Program Chair of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC), and Program Chair of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC). His recent research interests are in the monitoring, adaptation, evolution of service oriented applications, and in the development of new-generation services delivery platforms for improving individual and societal quality of life.

AbstractService-based systems have to deal with highly dynamic environments in which they must often operate. Consider for instance the case of smart cities and communities, i.e., communities of people who actively participate to the creation and use of ICT-based solutions to improve their quality of life within their own city or region. Within a smart city and community, the context in which applications must operate continuously changes, as well as the situation, the accessibility to (ICT-based) services, the people, their interactions, requirements, and preferences. Moreover, most often, the only way applications can react to such changing environment is at run-time, since we cannot predict a priori different situations, requirements, interactions, and availability of (ICT) services. Continuous context-aware and incremental adaptation becomes therefore the key enabling property for the delivery of ICT based value added services to cope with the dynamics of the continuously changing environment.

In my talk, I will present some of the compelling needs for context aware incremental adaptation in the case of service-based applications for smart cities and communities. I will discuss some alternative approaches, some lessons learned from applications we have been working with in this field, and the still many related open research challenges.

Smart City Concepts - Chances and Risks of Energy Efficient Urban Development

Rudolf GiffingerVienna University of TechnologyAustria

Brief BioProfessor Dr. Rudolf Giffinger is an expert in analytical research of urban and regional development. His research mainly concentrates on intra-urban development, urban decay, segregation/integration as well as on urban/metropolitan competitiveness of selected cities and respective strategic issues. He published and edited books, journals and articles on that subjects. He chairs working groups and is member of networks primarily related to urban and regional development in Central and Southeast Europe. Rudolf Giffinger is professor in Regional Science and head of the Centre of Regional Science which is part of the Department of Spatial Development, Infrastructure and Environmental Planning at the Vienna University of Technology.

AbstractOn the background of globalization and climate change discussions about urban development are not only concentrating on socio-economic restructuring and economic positioning but also on issues of emissions and energy efficient development. As such trends are in particular affecting urban development – very often accompanied with relative strong growth – attention is focusing on the the question how cities might meet challenges of improved quality of life and sustainable development, but also of improved urban competitiveness in an interregional and even global context.Due to these trends and challenges the idea of a Smart City concept emerged and has been widely discussed. However, looking on this discussion (and respective strategic efforts) one can easily detect the different understandings which are more or less directly related to the question ‘How can cities use and implement technical innovations in the urban fabric?’ Besides, corresponding programs of the EU or of national funds (like in Austria) are supporting projects aiming at the transformation of energy provision and reduction of emissions.

Facing these trends the contribution will give an overview about the understanding of the smart city idea and the differences across specific approaches. Based on this overview chances and risks regarding energy efficient urban developments are worked out. Finally, the presentation will conclude with specific suggestions of the understanding and respective recommendations for strategic planning.

Smart Cities Concept and Challenges - Bases for the Assessment of Smart City Projects

Andrés MonzónUniversidad Politecnica de MadridSpain

Brief Bio

Prof. Monzon is a Civil Engineer and holds an MSc in Transport and Urban Planning and a PhD in Transport. He is the Director of TRANSyT (Transport Research Centre) and Professor of Transportation Planning at the Civil Engineering Department, UPM. His main areas of research are Sustainable Transportation Planning, Transport Demand Management and Urban Public Transportation. He has published 43 books and chapters of books, 50 papers in scientific journals, 64 papers in international Conference Proceedings and 48 in national Conferences and Symposiums. He has been supervisor of 24 doctoral theses. Furthermore, Prof. Monzon has participated in 66 research projects, 35 as director. He is currently taking part on the UPM initiative “City of the Future” and participates as professor and mobility area coordinator in the Master of City Sciences. Besides, he is currently leading the ASCIMER project, which is financed by EIB and seeks to develop assessment methodologies for Smart City Projects in the Mediterranean Region.

AbstractASCIMER (Assessing Smart Cities in the Mediterranean Region) is a project developed by the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid (UPM) for the EIBURS call on “Smart City Development: Applying European and International Experience to the Mediterranean Region”.Nowadays, many initiatives aimed at analysing the conception process, deployment methods or outcomes of the -referred as- Smart City projects are being developed in multiple fields. Since its conception, the Smart City notion has evolved from the execution of specific projects to the implementation of global strategies to tackle wider city challenges. ASCIMER´s project takes as a departure point that any kind of Smart City assessment should give response to the real challenges that cities of the 21st century are facing. It provides a comprehensive overview of the available possibilities and relate them to the specific city challenges.A selection of Smart City initiatives will be presented in order to establish relations between the identified city challenges and real Smart Projects designed to solve them. As a result of the project, a Best Practices Guide has been developed as a tool for the implementation of Smart Cities that efficiently respond to complex and diverse urban challenges without compromising their sustainable development and while improving the quality of life of their citizens.

Vision-based Perception for Intelligent Vehicles

Alberto BroggiVisLab - Universita' di ParmaItaly

Brief BioProf. Alberto Broggi received the Dr. Ing. (Master) degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information Technology both from the Universita` di Parma, Italy. He is now Full Professor at the Universita` di Parma and the President of VisLab, the Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory.As a pioneer in the use of machine vision for automotive applications and on driverless cars, he authored of more than 150 publications on international scientific journals, book chapters, refereed conference proceedings. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems for the term 2004-2008; he served the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society as President for the term 2010-2011. He is recipient of two ERC (European Research Council) prestigious grants.

AbstractThe keynote will focus on the latest developments in terms of perception on board of vehicles. Many prototype vehicles have been design and implemented worldwide, each with its own sensor suite; vision is playing an ever increasing role since cameras performance is improving year after year and processing power is becoming available at a low cost.The presentation will highlight the benefits of using vision as the main perception technology and will describe some ongoing experiments on full 360-degree 3D reconstruction in real time.